Satyendra Nath Bose, Bose-Einstein Statistics, and the Quantum Theory of an Ideal Gas

Fabrice P. Laussy

Enric Pérez Canals, Tilman Sauer

Vito Barbarani

Barry R. Masters

Although not as well known as his contemporaries, Satyendra Nath Bose was arguably one of the most important scientists in the 20th century. His revolutionary way of viewing photon behavior and photon statistics-later known as Bose statistics-changed the field in a dramatic way.

Golam Ali Sekh, B. Talukdar

Satyendra Nath (S.N.) Bose is one of the great Indian scientists. His remarkable work on the black body radiation or derivation of Planck’s law led to quantum statistics, in particular, the statistics of photon. Albert Einstein applied Bose’s idea to a gas made of atoms and predicted a new state of matter now called Bose-Einstein condensate. It took 70 years to observe the predicted condensation phenomenon in the laboratory. With a brief introduction to the formative period of Professor Bose, this research survey begins with the founding works on quantum statistics and, subsequently, provides a brief account of the series of events terminating in the experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensation. We also provide two simple examples to visualize the role of synthetic spin-orbit coupling in a quasi-one-dimensional condensate with attractive atom-atom interaction.

C. G. Townsend, Wolfgang Ketterle, S. Stringari

In 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent Einstein a paper in which he derived the Planck law for black-body radiation by treating the photons as a gas of identical particles. Einstein generalized Bose's theory to an ideal gas of identical atoms or molecules for which the number of particles is conserved and, in the same year, predicted that at sufficiently low temperatures the particles would become locked together in the lowest quantum state of the system. We now know that this phenomenon, called Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), only happens for “bosons” – particles with a total spin that is an integer multiple of h, the Planck constant divided by 2π.